I just got home from the Organic Growers’ School Spring Conference near Asheville, NC. On Friday, I gave an all-day workshop with Ira Wallace, on Year-Round Growing on the Farm and Garden. The classroom at Creekside Farm, Arden was packed. This farm also has an educational center, which made a great setting for our workshop. The weather was awful, so we didn’t explore the very wet farm much. We had plenty of indoor teaching material including show-and-tell. The funniest part was my Julia Child chicken-on-the-floor moment when I dropped a freshly -made soil block on the nice wood floor.

On Saturday and Sunday, I gave my Sustainable Farming Practices presentation, which is now on www.SlideShare.net, and posted here for convenient viewing. Just click the diagonal arrow icon to see it full screen.

Now I have a couple of lovely days at home, working in the hoophouse and greenhouse. The crew is steadily composting more beds, sowing peas and transplanting endless spinach beds (our spring is short and then heats up, so to get a longer spring spinach season, we do all transplants.)

Elsewhere for interesting gardening and farming reading, I am enjoying The Modern Farmer an online and digital subscription magazine with lots of thought-provoking and useful articles. Some recent ones I really like include

Transplant cipollini seedlings. Cipollini, also known as pearl or boiling onions, are varieties of short day onions sown in spring, planted at high density, which form small bulbs and mature in a couple of months.

Harvest ramps, sustainably for one month, from when tree buds appear (late March or early April in the Appalachians). Ramps are a spring ephemeral of deciduous forests. By late May, the leaves die back and a flower stem emerges. Wild ramps are being over-harvested, and it is important to make sure that not all these wild culinary delights vanish and they are still able to find their way onto plates in a sustainable fashion. See

Sustainable ramp harvestingBjorn Bergman: only 5 to 10 percent of the ramps in a patch should be harvested each year to ensure their future survival

Harvested ramps.Photo Small Farm Central

Alliums to Eat from Storage in March

Eat softneck garlic from storage once all the hardneck has been used (softneck stores longer)

Eat bulb onions from storage, including bulbils from Egyptian onions if you stored those.

Alliums to Weed in March

All overwintered alliums will need weeding in March and once a month after that until harvest. Mulched crops can be weeded during wet weather, if necessary, and the pulled weeds can be discarded on top of the mulch, where they stand a much better chance of dying then weeds discarded on bare soil! It is helpful to have a list of tasks that can be done when the soil is wet, in case of a wet spring (or any season really). Perennial crops and annuals with mulch are the main jobs for this list (along with tool repair and sharpening).

Newly planted alliums in bare soil will benefit from hoeing during dry weather before the weeds get very big at all. Hoe every 1-4 weeks as needed until harvest. Because of their vertical tubular or strap-like leaves, alliums do not compete well with broadleaf weeds and can easily become stunted in high weeds. We learned the hard way one year when our leek beds grew very big weeds. Even though we did pull the weeds, the leeks never grew very big. As well as the competition for light, we think our huge weeds pulled too many nutrients from the soil. After that, we acknowledged the wisdom of growing fewer leeks and taking care of them better, rather than over-extending ourselves.

Calculate how many leeks of each variety you want to harvest, add a margin. Each of our 90 ft (27.5 m) raised beds takes 4 rows of leeks, with plants 6″ (15 cm) apart. That’s 720 plants per bed. We sow in 24″ (60 cm) long flats, aiming for 3 seeds per inch (<1 cm apart). With 6 rows per flat, we need 1.67 flats/bed with no extras. We’ll call that 2 flats per bed.

We don’t need heat to start the leek seedlings, only time, so we put the flats directly into the coldframe. The minimum temperature for leek germination is 35F (), the optimum 65-85F () and they take 8-16 days just to germinate, even at the ideal temperature. Alliums are so slow! I always allow at least 10 days.

Leeks take 10-12 weeks to grow to transplant size. We sow ours March 21 for June 1 transplanting, which is only 10 weeks. When we grew them in a raised bed, it took 12 weeks. We like Lincoln and King Richard for leeks to eat in October and November and Tadorna for over-wintering, to eat December-February.

Transplanting onions

Transplant fall-sown onions as early in spring as possible, and those sown after New Year once they have at least three leaves (four or five is better). The final bulb size is affected by the size of the transplant as well as the maturity date of that variety. The ideal transplant is slightly slimmer than a pencil, but bigger than a pencil lead. Onion seedlings are slow-growing: even in spring they can take ten weeks to reach a size suitable for transplanting. Overly large transplants are more likely to bolt. If seedlings are becoming thicker than a pencil before you can set them out, undercut two inches (5 cm) below the surface to reduce the growth rate. Or use them as scallions.

Some books recommend trimming the tops at transplanting time, but I used to avoid this because I believed it reduces the yield. I forced myself to test out this idea one year, and found I got the same yield from trimmed and untrimmed onions. Trimmed ones are easier to plant. Transplant 4″ (10 cm) apart for single seedlings or 12″ (30 cm) for clumps of three or four (not more than four). Set plants with the base (stem plate) 1/2″–1″ (1.3–2.5 cm) below the soil surface. Some books recommend as deep as two inches (5 cm). Don’t plant too shallowly. Give plenty of water to the young transplants: keep the top 3″–4″ (8–10 cm) of the soil damp for the first few weeks to prevent the stem plate from drying out.

Onion bed in late April.Photo Kathryn Simmons

Harvesting garlic scallions

With a last frost date of 20–30 April, we harvest garlic scallions from early March until May, if our supply lasts out, and we don’t need the space for something else. Harvesting is simple, although depending on your soil, you may need to loosen the plants with a fork rather than just pulling. Trim the roots, rinse, bundle, set in a small bucket with a little water, and you’re done!

Some people cut the greens at 10″ (25 cm) tall and bunch them, allowing cuts to be made every two or three weeks. We tried this, but prefer to simply lift the whole plant once it reaches about 7″–8″ (18–20 cm). The leaves keep in better condition if still attached to the clove. Scallions can be sold in small bunches of three to six depending on size. If you do have more than you can sell in the spring, you could chop and dry them, or make pesto for sale later in the year.

Onion bolting factors

Onions are cool-season plants. They have three distinct phases of growth — vegetative, bulbing and blooming (bolting), and the switch from one phase to the next is triggered by environmental factors. It does not work to plant onions at a random date in the year without taking account of these environmental factors. Success depends on understanding what this crop needs during each of the three phases. To get a full understanding of the three phases and the factors that cause plants to switch to the next phase, see the Bulb Onions chapter of my book, Sustainable Market Farming.

Defining your Market: Are you growing for yourself or for others? When and how much do you need to harvest? Learn about yields of common crops and begin to create a growing plan.

Season Extension: From transplants and row cover in the spring, to hoop houses in the winter, learn to keep crops alive through the seasons. Calculate the last worthwhile planting date in your area, and choose a suitable combination of warm weather crops, cool weather crops, storage crops and cold-hardy crops appropriate for your scale.

Temperature Resilience: Discover tips to deal with extreme hot and cold temperature ranges including getting seeds germinated, identifying crops that do well in both extremes, and the importance of crop diversification. Climate change necessitates adaptive growing practices. We will incorporate soil building and water management, as well as the importance of seed saving and variety trials.

Crop Rotation: Keep roots in the ground at all times! Learn the art of crop rotation using planting calendars, observation, and garden planning. Discover relay planting, cover cropping, isolation distances, plants to attract pollinators, as well as tricks for fitting minor crops into available spaces.

On Saturday and Sunday at 9.00-10.30 am I will be teaching Sustainable Farming Practices, with a primary audience of beginner farmers. (Everyone is welcome!).

The Organic Growers School Spring Conference is for farmers, gardeners, homesteaders, and sustainability seekers.The Spring Conference offers practical, region-specific workshops on farming, gardening, permaculture, urban growing, and rural living and includes a trade show, a seed exchange,special guest speakers, and a Saturday evening social. More than 150 classes—both 90-minute sessions and half-day workshops—are offered on Saturday and Sunday in 17 learning tracks:

1.Community Food

2.Cooking

3.Earth Skills

4.Farmers: Beginning

5.Farmers: Experienced

6.Gardening

7.Herbs

8.Homesteading

9.Livestock

10.Mushrooms

11.Permaculture

12.Pollinators

13.Poultry

14.Soils

15.Sustainable Forestry

16.Sustainable Living

17.Thinking Big

“The Spring Conference features a trade show on Saturday and Sunday that showcases a wide array of exhibitors and products from local farms, gardening suppliers, and cottage industries that specialize in organic products and resources. Also featured on Saturday and Sunday is the annual Seed and Plant Exchange booth which offers the opportunity to preserve genetic diversity and protect regionally adapted varieties. Attendees may bring excess seeds and small plants to share, barter, or trade.For 25 years, the Spring Conference has allowed OGS to reinforce Western NC’s role as a regional leader in sustainable food and farming. Attendees come from 18 states and Canada and have described the event as the kick-start to the growing season. The event has grown exponentially—from a small gathering of 100 growing enthusiasts in 1993 to a regionally recognized conference drawing over 2,500 attendees, exhibitors and speakers.“The 25th Anniversary of the OGS Spring Conference is really a celebration of our regional wisdom and commitment to land stewardship, sustainable food systems, and local farming,”says OGS Executive Director, Lee Warren.“The conference is a gathering place, a source of inspiration, and a reminder of the richness of our community,”

The 25th annual Virginia Festival of the Book will take place Wednesday, March 20 through Sunday, March 24, 2019 in venues across Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia. For more, click Virginia Festival of the Book 2019 Schedule.

“Pam Dawling (The Year-Round Hoophouse) and co-authors Claudia Kousoulas and Ellen Letourneau (Bread & Beauty) discuss their personal approaches to preserving, cultivating, and enjoying land responsibly in the Mid-Atlantic region. Book sales and signing will follow. FREE to attend and open to the public.”

I’ve feeding in a flurry of slideshows I’ve been presenting at conferences this winter. You’ll notice a lot of them have a hoophouse theme, although not all. Here’s one from the four hour course I gave at the Virginia Association for Biological Farming conference.

To view the slideshow full screen, click the diagonal arrow icon. You can then hop, skip and jump through it, choosing the bits you are interested in.

My other main topic this week is choosing when to transplant and when to direct sow. I am a big fan of transplanting, so I’ll start with that.

Watermelon transplants in a Winstrip plug flat. Watermelons give earlier harvests from transplants, and plants in plug flats transplant easier than from open flats.Photo Pam Dawling

Advantages of transplanting:

You can start earlier in the year than you can outside, and so get earlier harvests

By starting seed in more ideal conditions in a greenhouse, (or on a kitchen windowsill), you’ll get better growth, more satisfaction!

It is easier to care for new seedlings indoors – major weather events stay outdoors!

You can fit more crops into each bed throughout the season, because each crop is occupying the bed for less time than if direct-sown.

Transplanting. can help you grow more successions of summer crops, as each one needs less time in the garden or field. This helps you always have good quality fresh produce for harvest.

If you don’t want or need to plant more food crops, you can use those time windows for quick cover crops, such as buckwheat in warm weather, mustards in cold weather.

You will save on seed costs, because you’ll be sowing and spotting or potting up, then transplanting, not sowing long rows and thinning most of the plants out.

Using transplants fits (better than direct sowing does) with using plastic (or paper) mulches, which can help with weed control and soil warming (or cooling).

Using transplants fits well with no-till cover crops. Mow or roll-and-crimp the cover crops, transplant into it, and the dead mulch keeps the weeds away for 6-8 weeks in our climate, longer in cooler and drier climates.

Transplanting works well for crops where you want several varieties, such as tomatoes and peppers.

Amy’s Apricot tomato from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. Transplanting works well for crops where you want a few plants each of several varieties.Photo Pam Dawling

You have more flexibility if the weather turns bad, for example if spring is cold and/or wet. You can delay transplanting. Your plants still grow, provided the roots have enough space. If you know they won’t, you can pot them up to provide more root space.

At transplanting time, you can select the sturdiest plants, and compost the rest, meaning you have the best chance of good yields.

Disadvantages of transplanting:

If you extend the season and start earlier, you will have more work. . .

You’ll need to spend extra time caring for the starts indoors, as they won’t get water if you don’t provide it.

Transplant shock can delay harvest, so be sure to learn and practice good techniques

More attention is needed to watering new plants after transplanting, (compared to direct seedling) as some root damage is almost inevitable. (Plug flats and soil blocks minimize root damage)

If you don’t have a good irrigation system or water supply, growing many transplants will be a challenge.

Likewise you do need a good greenhouse set-up to grow many transplants.

Advantages of direct seeding:

See the disadvantages of transplanting.

Direct seeding is less work than transplanting. Put the seed in the ground, water as needed and stand back!

Here’s my updated Crop Planning slideshow, which I presented last weekend at the Virginia Association for Biological Farming Conference. To view it full screen, click the diagonal arrow in the lower right.

I will upload my other presentations bit by bit. January and early February are choc-a-bloc with conferences and slideshows, so there will be plenty to see in the next couple of months!

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Seed flats in the greenhouse in early spring.Photo Kathryn Simmons

Spring starts in January in Virginia! On January 17 we make our first sowings in the greenhouse. We sow some early cabbage, the first lettuce, and some scallions. The week after that we sow our hoophouse tomatoes! Ah! Signs of spring! Even if we did manufacture them, so to speak!

Our germinator cabinet is made from a broken fridge, warmed by an incandescent light-bulb. We’ve got maybe one more year before we run out of incandescent light-bulbs. Then we’ll have to get a different form of heating. But we’re shelving that problem for now. We check twice a day to make sure the light-bulb is still working and the temperature in the germination chamber is still OK.

By the end of February, we’ll have sown tomatoes and peppers for growing in our hoophouse, and spinach, kale, collards, cabbage, lettuce, scallions, broccoli and senposai for planting outdoors.

When the cabbages emerge, we’ll need to make space for the flat in the greenhouse near the window. When the hoophouse tomatoes have germinated, they will go in a plastic tent on a seed heating mat by the greenhouse windows. We have the 48″ x 20″ size mat, and we extend the plastic tent and graduate the older seedlings off the mat, but still under the tent for extra protection.

Our system for seed compost is to screen a big pile of our homemade compost in September, and fill the cinder-block beds in the greenhouse. Then we pop lettuce transplants at 10″ spacing into the beds. Those lettuces give us salad from November to February. As we need space in the greenhouse, we pull the lettuce. We can then scoop out the compost to fill the flats for seedlings. This system works well time-wise –we benefit from this lettuce supply in the winter. It also works well in providing us with a large quantity of mellow screened compost for seed flats, indoors and not frozen. The soil organisms have had time to colonize the compost, so it is full of life.

As the seedlings grow, we spot them out into bigger flats, with about 2.5″ between plants. My favorite tool for this job is a butter knife! For lettuce we use 3″ deep flats, but for most crops we use 4″ deep flats, so the roots have plenty of space. We use a dibble board to make the evenly spaced holes in the compost in the bigger flats, to move the tiny seedlings into. It’s a piece of plywood with fat dowel pegs glued into holes at the right spacing, 40 in a 12″ x 24″ flat. On the other side of the board are two small wood handles to make it easy to use.

A flat of scallions to transplant in April.Photo Pam Dawling

There is a great website on Vegetable Transplant Production from the University of Florida Vegetable horticulture Program. It has a collection of excellent articles developed by Charles Vavrina in the late nineties. Plants still grow the same way! Check out the site for lots of useful tips about growing and using transplants. This is a good time of year to make plans to do something in a different way, to avoid repeating last year’s less successful episodes!

Clumps of scallion transplants in a plug flat, ready to transplant.Photo Pam Dawling

Plant scallions, shallots, cipollini mini-onions, small potato onions

In January, one of the first crops we sow is scallions for transplant. We sow in 200-cell plug flats, on January 17, aiming to get 4-6 seeds per cell. It takes 4 gm of seed for 200 cells. We transplant these clumps on March 21, with 3″ (7 cm) space between plugs. We need about 50 row feet (15 m) This grows us scallions already in bunches, and makes excellent use of the space. We make a second sowing of the same size on February 17 and transplant April 14. We also grow scallions in the hoophouse in winter.

French Red Shallot bulbs. Photo Raddysh Acorn

Plant shallot bulbs January-February, if you haven’t done so before the winter.

Between late January and mid-February, sow shallot seeds. Transplant in late March. Shallots from seed will be ready for harvest 7/4-7/30, about a month later than harvests from replanted bulbs.

Cipollini, Mini-onions, Pickling Onions

Like bulb onions and scallions, cipollini are a biennial crop grown as an annual (A. cepa var. cepa). They are small bulb onions used whole for kebabs, pickles, casseroles, and stews. Depending on your latitude and the variety’s adaptation, these will provide bulbs from the size of large cherries to ping-pong balls. They tend to dry down nicely and store well. White varieties get sunburn here. Red Marble is good, stores well. Purplette doesn’t store well.

Mini-onions are viewed as a gourmet item, so the prices you can get may justify giving them greenhouse bench space, or even growing space in a hoophouse. We can grow these outdoors from seed sown 1/17-1/25, transplanting 3/10-3/21, leading to harvest 7/1-7/17.

In late January, plant small potato onions (smaller than 1.5″/4 cm) late January as soon as the ground can be worked. Or early February, if January is not possible. See Alliums for December for planting medium-sized bulbs, Alliums for September for information on planting the large ones. In order to make January planting possible, we prepare the bed for the small potato onions in the late fall and cover it with mulch for the winter. In late January or early February, we remove the mulch, make 4 deep furrows, plant the small onions (<1½”, 4 cm) on 4″ (10 cm) centers, cover with ½”-1″ (1-3 cm) soil, tamp down, and replace 4″-8″ (10-20 cm) of mulch. Label and write down how much seed was used. Eat any leftovers or give them to a friend. For 360′ (111 m) at 4″ (10 cm), we need 1080 bulbs plus 20% spare. (Approx 1300 bulbs). 425 bulbs = 18-20lbs (8-9 kg), 1lb (500 gm) =20-33 bulbs.

Harvesting and Eating

Eat onions and garlic from storage, including bulbils from Egyptian onions if you stored those.

Pearl onions (Allium ampeloprasumsectivum), also known as button or baby onions in the UK, or creamers in the US, are a close relative of leeks, with thin skins and a mild, sweet flavor. They grow up to 1′ (2.5 cm) in diameter. They are especially popular in the Netherlands and Germany. Unlike bulb onions, they do not have layers of storage leaves but only a single storage leaf, like the non-layered cloves of garlic. The onions are ready to harvest 90 days from sowing. They are mostly used for pickling. Most onions grown for pickling today are simply small crowded bulb onions, with layers. Also see the Useful Temperate Plants Site and How to grow Pearl Onions by Jenny Harrington

Canada onion (aka Wild onion) (Allium canadense) is a perennial sounding very like what we call onion grass or wild garlic in Virginia, although that is Allium vineale (crow garlic). The leaves of onion grass are hollow and round, while those of Canada onion are more flat and ‘solid’.

Kurrat ( kurrat), is a Middle-Eastern cultivated leek, used mainly for the greens, which may be cut from the plant repeatedly.

Field garlicAllium oleraceum is native to most of Europe, where it is a wild perennial, growing tall leaves (the part that is used).

Ramsons Allium ursinum, buckrams, wild garlic, broad-leaved garlic, wood garlic, bear leek, or bear’s garlic, common in Europe. Looks like Ramps, (Allium tricoccum) but is not the same. The broad flat leaves are the part used.

Japanese bunching onion and Welsh onion (native to Siberia or China, not Wales) are Allium fistulosum. They are sometimes used as scallions, as are some A. cepa. Young plants of A. fistulosum and A. cepa look very similar, but may be distinguished by their leaves, which are circular in cross-section in A. fistulosum rather than flattened on one side. A. fistulosum has hollow leaves (fistulosum means “hollow”), scapes and does not develop bulbs – the leaves are the part which is eaten.

Because crops grow slowly in cold weather, if something goes wrong at the beginning of the winter, or in the fall, the consequences can cast a long shadow. It is not easy to make up for lost time. In spring, the weather is getting warmer, the daylight is lengthening, and you may have noticed that later sowings can catch up with ones a week or two earlier, allowing for a second chance. In the fall, the rate of growth is moving in the opposite direction, and later sowings will stand no chance of catching up. Even worse, they may get “trapped” like Persephone in the Underworld during the dark Persephone Days. But don’t despair – there are things you can do ahead of time to be prepared for plans going awry, and there are even a few things you can do instead of your original plan, to ensure you get some crops to harvest.

Transplant seedlings under insect netting outdoors.Photo Pam Dawling

Starting outdoors in September

We sow a lot of our winter crops outdoors in September, and transplant them into the hoophouse in October. This gives us an extra few weeks to prepare the hoophouse beds, and gives the seeds the cooler outdoor conditions to germinate in. We have three sowing dates.

On September 24, we sow another 10 varieties of lettuce; Red and White Russian kales, Senposai, more Yukina Savoy, mizuna and arugula, and we resow anything that didn’t do well in the 9/15 sowing

On September 30, we resow anything that didn’t do well in the 9/24 sowing, or substitutes.

Emergency back-up seedlings for the hoophouse.Photo Pam Dawling

This year, we had poor germination of a lot of the 9/15 sowings and too many of the 9/24 sowings. As a back-up for the back-up plans we sowed some crops in Winstrip trays, and spotted lettuce in open flats, which we kept inside the hoophouse. By that point, conditions in the hoophouse were more crop-friendly than outdoors. We did need some of these, and the rest we harvested for salad mixes right out of the flats! We were short of salad items because of the late establishment of the plants, so every plant was a help!

A flat of lettuce transplants in the path in the hoophouse.Photo Pam Dawling

Our goal is to keep the space filled with useful crops.

Success with this goal relies on a cluster of strategies

The fall transplant program I describe above.

Follow-on crops: A sequence of different crops occupying the same space over time. It’s important to know when crops will bolt, and how to plant sensible quantities

Filler crops: As well as scheduled plantings, in October we sow a few short rows of spinach, lettuce, Senposai, Yukina Savoy, Maruba Santoh, Tokyo Bekana to transplant into gaps as soon as they occur. We simply dig them up, replant where needed and water well. Bare-root transplants are much easier than many fear. They save time and money, compared to growing starts in flats, and save on greenhouse space. They are very sturdy plants, as they have the full depth of soil to develop big roots. Little extra care is needed, as they are less prone to drying out than seedlings in flats. Alternatively you could keep some plug flats of these plants handy. We fill gaps with Asian greens, spinach or lettuces as appropriate, until Jan 25. From Jan 25 to Feb 20 we fill all gaps everywhere with spinach From Feb 20, we only fill gaps on the outer thirds of the beds, leaving centers free for tomatoes, etc.

Interplanting: After 2/20, we harvest the winter crops from the center rows first, plant the new early summer crops down the center, then harvest the outer rows bit by bit as the new crop needs the space or the light. This overlap allows the new crops to take over gradually. Our winter and spring crops end in April

Fast Catch Crops. Some cool-weather crops mature in 60 days or less. Mostly these are greens and fast-growing root crops. Useful if a crop fails, or you have a small empty space. Details on some of these follow the list.

Ready in 35–45 days in fall: chervil, corn salad, land cress, parsley and sorrel.

Ready in 60 days in fall: beets, small fast cabbage, collards, kohlrabi and turnips.

Asian Greens

Asian greens are better able to germinate in hot weather than lettuce, and are faster growing than lettuce. Transplant 2-3 weeks after fall sowing, or direct sow.

Asian greens are nutritious as well as tasty – flavors vary from mild to peppery – read the catalog descriptions before growing lots. Colors cover the spectrum: chartreuse, bright green, dark green and purple. A diversity of crops without a diversity of growing methods!

Brassica (Mustard) Salad Mixes

Interesting mustard mixes are sold for salad mixes. We often mix our own Brassica Salad Mix from leftover random brassica seeds. For a single cut, almost all brassicas are suitable – just avoid turnips and radishes with prickly leaves! We sow between 10/2 and 11/14 for winter harvest and from 12/4 to 2/12 for March and early April harvests. We’re zone 7, central Virginia.

Varieties we like: Easter Egg, White Icicle, and Cherry Belle.Sparkler got too fibrous for us, as did Cherry Belle after mid Oct. We make 6 sowings 9/6 – 1/26. Small radishes take 27–52 days to maturity, not counting days too cold to grow.

Scallions in our hoophouse in late November.Photo Pam Dawling

Scallions

We sow 9/6 for harvest 12/1 – 3/1; 11/18 (following radishes) for harvest in early spring. This winter we are trying a sowing 10/20 also (we happened to have a space at that time, in a spot where it fitted our rotation). Evergreen Hardy White and White Lisbon scallions are hardy down to 0°F (-18°C)

We do 2 sowings of chard, scallions, tatsoi and yukina savoy; 3 sowings of mizuna, turnips and bulb onions; 4 sowings of baby lettuce mix and brassica salad mix; 5 sowings of spinach and radish. Our goal is to provide a continuous supply.

As temperatures and day-length decrease in the fall, the time to maturity lengthens – a day late in sowing can lead to a week’s delay in harvesting. As temperatures and day-length increase after the Winter Solstice, the time to maturity shortens – later sowings can almost catch up with earlier ones. To get harvests starting an equal number of days apart, vary the interval between one sowing date and the next accordingly. Here’s the most dependable method:

Making a Close-Fit Plan Using Graphs

Gather sowing and harvest start and finish dates for each planting of each crop you are growing as successions.

Make a graph for each crop: sowing date along the horizontal (x) axis; harvest start date along the vertical (y) axis. Mark in all your data. Join with a line. Smooth the line.

From your first possible sowing date find the first harvest start date.

Decide the last worthwhile harvest start date, mark that.

Divide the harvest period into a whole number of equal segments, according to how often you want a new patch.

Mark in the harvest start dates and see the sowing dates that match those harvest dates

Alliums are more cold-tolerant than most people believe. Here are my observations of killing temperatures for outdoor crops. Note that crops often survive night-time lows in the hoophouse that would have killed them outdoors.

You can see my garlic slideshow for more info. I was surprised to find I haven’t written much in my blog about planting garlic, so here goes! See the alliums chapter in Sustainable Market Farming for more on types, varieties, and garlic genetics. The information here comes form that chapter.

When to Plant Garlic

Plant when the soil temperature at 4″ (10 cm) deep is 50°F (10°C) at 9 am. If the fall is unusually warm, wait a week. Instructions from Texas A&M say less than 85°F (29°C) at 2″ (5 cm) deep. We plant in early November. In New Hampshire, mid-October is the time. The guideline for areas with cold winters is 2-3 weeks after the first frost but before the ground freezes solid for the winter. In Michigan, planting time is 6 weeks prior to the ground freezing, giving enough time for root growth only, to avoid freezing the leaves. In California, garlic can be planted in January or February.

Both hardneck and softneck garlic do best when planted in the fall, though softneck garlic may also be planted in the very early spring if you have to (with reduced yields). If you miss the window for fall planting, ensure that your seed garlic gets 40 days at or below 40°F (4.5°C) in storage before spring planting, or the lack of vernalization will mean the bulbs will not differentiate (divide into separate cloves).

Garlic shoots emerging from the mulch a few weeks after November planting. Photo Twin Oaks Community

Garlic roots will grow whenever the ground is not frozen, and the tops will grow whenever the temperature is above 40°F (4.5°C). In colder areas the goal is to get the garlic to grow roots before the big freeze-up arrives, but not to make top growth until after the worst of the weather. In warmer areas, the goal is to get enough top growth in fall to get off to a roaring start in the spring, but not so much top growth that the leaves cannot endure the winter. If garlic gets frozen back to the ground in the winter, it can regrow and be fine. If it dies back twice in the winter, the yield will be lower than it might have been if you had been luckier with the weather. When properly planted, it can withstand winter lows of –30°F (–35°C). If planted too early, too much tender top growth happens before winter. If planted too late, there will be inadequate root growth before the winter, and a lower survival rate as well as smaller bulbs.

How Much Garlic to Plant

A yield ratio of 1:6 or 7 seems typical, and makes complete sense when you consider you are planting one clove to get a bulb of 6–7 cloves. Divide the amount you intend to produce by six to figure out how much to plant. For large areas 750–1,000 lbs/ac (842–1,122 kg/ha) are needed for plantings in double rows, 3″–4″ in-row (7.5–10 cm), beds 39″ (1 m) apart. For single rows, 8 lbs (3.6 kg) of hardneck or 4 lbs (1.8 kg) of softneck plants about 100′ (30 m). In the US, one person eats 3–9 lbs (1.4–4.2 kg) per year.

The garlic for planting should be taken apart into separate cloves 0–7 days before planting. We are doing this on November 7, along with our crop review meeting when the crew meets to make notes on the past season. This task is a good group activity. Twist off the outer skins and pull the bulb apart, trying not to break the basal plate of the cloves (the part the roots grow from), as that makes them unusable for planting. With hardneck garlic, the remainder of the stem acts as a handy lever for separating the cloves. We sort as we go, putting good size cloves in big buckets, damaged cloves in kitchen buckets, tiny cloves in tiny buckets and outer skins and reject cloves in compost buckets. The tiny cloves get planted for garlic scallions. Don’t worry if some skin comes off the cloves — they will still grow successfully. Cloves for planting should be from large (but not giant) bulbs and be in good condition.

Click the link to read about hot water treatment for seed garlic at WeeBee Farms.

Pre-plant Seed Garlic Treatments

Many of us do nothing special with the cloves before planting, but if you have pest and disease problems, use pre-plant soaking treatments, usually done the night before planting. Some growers find they get better yields from treated cloves even if no problem was obvious.

To eradicate stem and bulb (bloat) nematode (Ditylenchus dipsaci), soak the separated cloves for thirty minutes in 100°F (37.7°C) water containing 0.1% surfactant (soap). Or soak for twenty minutes in the same strength solution at 120°F (48.5°C), then cool in plain water for 10-20 minutes.

Allow to dry for 2 hours at 100°F (37.7°C) or plant immediately. Anytime your garlic grows poorly and you can’t tell why, send a sample with the soil it’s growing in to your Extension Service to be tested for nematodes. Mites can eat the skins of the cloves, survive the winter and multiply all spring long, seriously damaging or even killing your crop. To kill mites (which hide between the wrappers) before planting, separate the bulbs into cloves and soak them overnight (up to 16 hours) in water.

Possible additions to the water include one heaping tablespoon of baking soda and one tablespoon of liquid seaweed per gallon (around 8 ml baking soda and 4 ml liquid seaweed per liter). Just before planting, drain the cloves and cover them in rubbing alcohol for three to five minutes, long enough for the alcohol to penetrate the clove covers and kill any mites inside. Then plant immediately. The long soaking will loosen the clove skins so that the alcohol can penetrate. Mite-infested garlic soaked like this does much better than unsoaked infested garlic. The solution used to kill mites can also be used to kill various fungal infections. The cloves need only fifteen to thirty minutes soaking.

In trials comparing treated and untreated cloves, treated cloves were larger and healthier than untreated ones. Fusarium levels can be kept down by adding wood ashes when planting and then possibly dusting the beds with more ashes over the winter (use moderation — don’t add so much that you make the soil alkaline). Or you could soak the cloves in a 10% bleach solution, then roll them in wood ash (wear gloves for handling ashy cloves). The wood ash soaks up the dampness of the bleach and provides a source of potassium. This information came from the Garlic Seed Foundation. Join GSF to find out all the details!

We developed a system of growing onion starts in our hoophouse over the winter and transplanting them bare-root outdoors in very early March. I wrote about choosing onion varieties for your latitude last month. There I explained that to grow big onions we need to have large transplants on March 1, so we can have big vegetative plants before bulbing is triggered by the daylength.

The method involves making two sowings of bulbing onions, each enough for the whole planting. This provides insurance in case one date turns out better than the other. Then we follow this up with a partial third sowing to make up numbers of any varieties that didn’t germinate well. We make our first sowing November 10, our second November 20, and a third on December 5 as a back-up in case of problems. Our formula is: divide the number of onion plants wanted by 20, to give minimum length of row to sow, in feet. And sow this amount twice, 10 days apart. The onions will be planted out at 4″ (10 cm) apart. We add 20% to provide some slack. For a final row of 100′ (30.5 m), we’d need 100′ × 3 per foot × 1.2 (adding 20%) plants. 360 plants. We sow 3 seeds per inch (approx. 1 cm apart), 36 per foot (30 cm). At this sowing rate, we need 120″, or 10′ (3 m).

See TheYear-Round Hoophouse for more on growing onions this way. If we find ourselves with extra onion plants in March, we usually re-categorize them as scallions. But we have also transplanted them in early March in a single row along the south edge of hoophouse beds, for an early crop. We got good onions but they dwarfed the pepper plants behind them. Maybe planting them on the north side of the bed is better?

Trimming roots from a leek in December.Photo Pam Dawling

Storing Leeks

I wrote about how to dig up leeks last month. In zone 7 we leave our leeks in the ground till we need them, being sure to harvest the less hardy Lincoln and King Richard first. We use a walk-in cooler for short term storage (up to a week) and keep the root ends in water. Leeks are best stored at 33°F (0.5°C) and 65% relative humidity. In colder zones, leeks can be harvested and stored in a root cellar or basement. This is helpful in areas where the ground freezes solid for weeks on end. You can store leeks with the roots packed in soil, shoulder to shoulder in a crate or box in a root cellar, where they will keep for six weeks. They can be stored in plastic bags for two to three months at the right temperature, or frozen. Another possibility is to leave them in the garden, mulched with a foot (30 cm) of straw or hay as well as rowcover, if temperatures are below 10°F (–12°C). Our winter temperatures fluctuate a lot, so covering in-ground crops with mulch doesn’t work well for us.

This is a book for new farmers, from two Virginia farmers. It is not an instruction manual on growing crops or raising livestock, nor on accounting and marketing. It is a book of suggestions on what aspiring sustainable farmers need to ponder, reflect on, take a cold hard look at before starting a farm of their own. It is a hybrid of insights, self-help wisdom, business savvy, and experience at the pointy end. The book addresses the huge problem of finding affordable land, and coming up with retirement plans that let you pass the farm down to the next generation, rather than selling it so you have a retirement fund. Their goal is to inspire as many new farmers as possible, so the focus is on small-scale manageable operations, which can provide success, and a very satisfying, joyful experience, along with the long hours of hard work.

The last chapter of the book, “Go!” can stand alone as a wonderful encouragement to new or beginning farmers – or actually old and retiring farmers too! The chapter is beautifully poetic. It leads us step by step through Your First Day, Your First Harvest, Your First Sale, imagining what that will be like. Next follows the caution: “It’s not rainbows and sweet breezes all the time.” Here’s encouragement to be prepared, to do what you have to, to respect the forces of nature, and be ready for the amazement, the unexpected awe and respect for nature. “The only thing we know for sure is that when we pour our passion into what we love, we end up with more than we give.”

Forrest Pritchard

Forrest is a seventh-generation farmer, raised on a 2000 acre farm that has provided corn, soybeans, apples, cherries, cattle, pigs, chickens. When his turn at the helm came, he transitioned the farm to sustainable livestock. Ellen is a first-generation farmer, growing vegetables since she was a teenager. She was hired in the 1990’s to manage one arm of Potomac Vegetable Farms, and went on to own this much admired and successful operation. This book provides different sorts of wisdom from each author. Hence each writes the chapters they have most expertise in, with some cross-fertilization of ideas. Both are very engaging writers.

Ellen Polishuk

As recently as 100 years ago, almost 40% of Americans were full-time farmers. Today it is less than 2%. The responsibility for feeding our society rests on the independent, altruistic farmers who devote their efforts to produce food for everyone else. Forrest calls them volunteers.

The authors caution that farming is for pragmatists, not perfectionists. Getting something 100% right in farming is not only rarely possible, it’s also rarely necessary. It’s better to be able to hoe beans quickly, with a few casualties, than to spend forever hoeing perfectly. There’s just too much to get done in a timely way. Good enough is better than perfect. Time is as valuable as money. In the short-term, you may be able to use off-farm income to help you get your farm up and running. Long-term (or sooner!) you’ll need to make enough for the farm to pay for all work done, and also make a profit (for retirement, kids’ college fund, a new tractor, another hoophouse).

Each chapter ends with a few searching questions, to help you get the most out of what you just read. Questions to help you assess your strengths and weaknesses, explore things you were ignoring and generally prepare yourself for the exciting huge task ahead. They also caution against biting off more than you can chew initially. Don’t grow every vegetable and flower and raise every possible kind of livestock! Start simpler and build up to your ideal level of diversity.

Don’t assume you should start by buying land. Life will be easier if you find land to farm that you don’t have to buy. The key is access to land, not acquisition, and the authors provide many models of how this can come about. There is a whole generation of farmers who want to retire, help a new generation of farmers start farming and see their land continue in agriculture. Debt-financed land purchasing is their least-recommended route. If that’s what you have to do, bypass conventional banks, go to the Farm Services Agency, which offers farm-friendly financing options, or look around for companies specializing in loans to farmers.

Forrest explains the blind-spot many of us have about compensating for the value of the land. The land, as an investment, needs to provide a financial return, in the same way that you’d expect from a pile of cash equal in value to the land. You wouldn’t leave the pile of cash under the mattress – you’d invest it so it would grow in value at least as much as annual inflation. And yet it can be hard to see that if we don’t get a similar return from a piece of land, it becomes an asset that steadily loses value that we are subsidizing with our time.

Forrest explains how the nation came to expect cheap food, and the consequences this has for farmers, and farming land. He explains how, from the sixteenth century onwards, land in North America was given free (we know who they took it from) to those favored by the people in power; to soldiers returning from the Revolutionary War; to those willing to farm in Florida (by Spain), or California (by Mexico); and then under the 1862 Homestead Act 270 million acres were given to 1.6 million farmers, a practice that continued as late as 1986 in Alaska. This lead generation after generation to not account for the value of the land properly. And so, cheap lettuce, cheap hamburgers, and a big challenge for farmers today to make a living and buy land.

Ellen writes an important introduction to soil physical composition, chemistry, biology, and explains replacing nutrients removed in crops. When visiting potential farms, give the soil good attention. This topic comes up again when Forrest writes about the importance of “putting things back” whether that’s tools or soil nutrients.

Ideas of complete independence and creative freedom as farmers can be a figment of our imaginations. We get a clear explanation of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and how this is going to have effects (which we have no control over) on our costs and our income. Your hard-striven-for crop might end up losing in the competition with an imported bumper crop being sold at rock-bottom prices. I’m also thinking about this year’s US soybean farmers whose markets in China have been strongly damaged by tariffs. For maximum independence from uncontrollable factors, look for sustainable markets that are less dependent on mainstream commodity system supplies or outlets. Identify a need, find the angle that is the best fit between your local customer and your strengths, foster your relationships.

Ellen’s chapter on Tai Chi Economics suggests methods to deal with uncontrollable outside economic forces, such as regional competition, government policies, national drought, international competition. What we can charge for tomatoes in Oregon is impacted by the price of natural gas in Pennsylvania, or the wages of underpaid farm workers in Florida. In Tai Chi, use grace to meet incoming force, engage that force until it wears itself out, and learn from your opponent. “The soft and the pliable will defeat the hard and the strong” (Lao-tzu). Develop holistic skills to make a profit while growing nutritious food for the world. “Those who say it can’t be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”

“Profit” is not a dirty word – profit allows the farm to grow and develop, pay decent wages, and provide security in case of disaster, and generally fund your life. The Tai Chi opportunity: make a profit while achieving the triple bottom line of a sustainable business: ecological stewardship, social justice, and economic viability.

Veggie Compass is a free farm management tool for diversified fresh market vegetable growers. It uses a spreadsheet to help farmers compute the real costs of growing a hundred crops and several different marketing channels. This tool can help farmers find which crops are their most successful, and which are the losers. The choices become clearer. If you are selling eggs at $6 a dozen, but they cost you $7 to produce, you’d do better just handing out dollar bills and not keep the hens at all. Let the antiquated notion of cheap food flow right past you! No other business apologizes for supplying a high quality product at a fair price. Record-keeping (noticing and writing down what happens and how well it worked) enables you to make improvements, rather than random changes.

Forrest introduces the Money Triangle. Financial stability depends on your potential to earn money, save money, and give money, in a balanced way. Savings are the catalyst for financial success. He suggests the 10% Plan. Make at least 10% net profit, save at least 10% of the profits (invested at 10% interest), give away 10% of what your investments make for you. It’s also a good rule for debt: never borrow more than 10% of your gross annual income, or pay more than 10% interest, preferably not more than 5%.

Three rules for beating the odds in farming: 1. If it’s broken, stop and fix it (relationships as well as tools); 2. Put it back where you found it (soil nutrients as well as tools); 3. Do what you say you are going to do (your customers’ trust, as well as faith in yourself.)

Forrest points out the wisdom of accepting that you won’t be able to function as a superior producer, an excellent bookkeeper and an all-star salesperson for more than a couple of years – you will need to get some help. Perhaps temporarily hire a professional salesperson who seems a good match, to identify good sales channels for you.

Ellen writes on Love, Work and Harmony. Grumpiness should be reserved for the time working alone! Build up relationship skills, you’ll need them with workers, friends and customers. To earn an annual income of $40,000 to $50,000, you would need to grow, harvest and market $125,000 worth of agricultural products. This is very difficult for one human alone. You need a workforce, and for that, you need good communication. Interns are students, not unpaid workers. The farmer has an obligation to educate, coach, encourage, and train any interns. This takes time away from production. Communication dramas can be the hardest part of farming. Learn early on how to speak your truth without criticism or blame and learn how to listen without taking offense. Keep time for the important people in your life, learn to leave the stresses outside your house, stick to daily finishing times. And don’t expect too much of yourself. “If you think you can farm and parent small children at the exact same time, you are doing neither activity well.” (Jean-Martin Fortier). If you have more than six people working for you, then keeping them, happy and productive is a full-time management job (Chris Blanchard). Don’t expect to cope with farming on your own in a place where you don’t know anybody – make a priority of finding folks to connect with.

Forrest writes on the Beautiful Paradox of Failure. No two seasons are the same. “Sustainable farming is built around the expectation that things change, that adaptability and innovation remain paramount, and that failure, when it occurs, is a critical teaching tool.” Failure arrives in many forms, despite all efforts to prevent it. And yet, without failure, we are less likely to improve. Forrest also discusses failures of faith, periods of despondency (mostly during droughts). He invites us, in the end-of-chapter questions, to think back to our biggest failures, how they shaped us, what we learned, and whether it still feels like a failure, in hindsight. Mine was the year I left the sweet potatoes in the ground too late, hoping for more growth to make up for a late start. Fall turned wet and cold and the sweet potatoes rotted or got chilling injury. It was a big mess. I learned a lot more about sweet potatoes as a result. It does still feel like a failure, although one of understandable ignorance. No-one around me knew any better at that time. I think it lead to me doing more research and record-keeping, perhaps even helped shape my path as a writer.

Ellen writes about how to appreciate the beauty around us, the daily moments of wonder, and our healthy lifestyle, although perhaps not the midnight struggles in the rain to set some emergency to rights. We do learn that it doesn’t matter if we have a headache, or feel lazy or sad, somethings just have to be done. Ellen calls this the priority of biology over attitude. We can call upon the grounding resources of clean air, vibrant plants, as remedies for our off days. We know producing food is a good and noble cause. If you read the final chapter first, read it again now!

Plant them at 8″ (20cm). If there are not enough large onions available, increase spacing or fill out with medium onions.

Cover with ½-1″ (1-2cm) soil, and add 4″-8″ (10-20cm) mulch.

Refrigerate any leftovers for November planting with the medium-sized onions, or eat or sell now.

Yields can be 3 to 8 times the weight of the seed stock, depending on growing conditions.

Individual bulbs can be grown indoors in a pot to produce a steady supply of green onions during the winter.

Sow ramp seeds in woodlands

Mature harvested ramp plants.Photo Small Farm Central

In zones 3-7, sow ramps seed during August and September (see August blogpost)

Ramps (also known as Wood Leeks or Wild Leeks) are a native woodland perennial, and can be found throughout the eastern-half of the United States, as far west as Oklahoma and as far north as the central and eastern provinces of Canada.

Ramps, (Allium tricoccum) have some of the flavor components of leeks, onions, and garlic. There are projects to re-establish ramps in a number of regions in the Eastern United States. Carriage House Farm is one such attempt by Grow Appalachia, which is a program of Berea College in Kentucky, Grow Appalachia works with farmers, gardeners, ranchers, and conservationists across a five state area to reintroduce old native and heirloom species of plants. Ramps is/was one plant in this program. It takes two years for ramp seeds to germinate and another 2-3 years till they hit harvestable levels.

Alliums to harvest in September

Egyptian onions produce tiny red-purple bulbs in the umbel instead of flowers, and were previously named Allium cepa var. proliferum. According to Wikipedia, they are now known to be a hybrid of A. cepa and A. fistulosum.

Japanese bunching onion and Welsh onion (native to China, not Wales) areAllium fistulosum. They are sometimes used as scallions, as are some A. cepa bulbing onions. Young plants of A. fistulosum and A. cepa look very similar, but may be distinguished by their leaves, which are circular in cross-section in A. fistulosum rather than flattened on one side. A. fistulosum has hollow leaves (fistulosum means “hollow”), scapes and does not develop bulbs – the leaves are the part that is eaten. Welsh onions are also known as cibol, chibbles (in Cornwall), escallion (in Jamaica), negi (in Japan), pa (in Korea), as well as green onions, salad onions, spring onions,. These general last names are also used for other kinds of onions where the leaves are the part eaten.

Perennial leeks are Allium Ampeloprasum. Common leeks are Allium ampeloprasum var. porrum (more about leeks in October and March). Elephant garlic is botanically a leek (A. ampeloprasum var. ampeloprasum).

Other Allium Tasks for September

See Alliums for August for more on all of the following jobs which continue into September:

Snipping and sorting garlic and potato onions

Trimming, sorting and storing bulb onions

Eating onions and garlic from storage

Inspect onions and garlic at least once a month. Remove bulbs which are sprouting or rotting or else the whole batch may spoil.

At the end of September I make the decision about how many potato onions to keep back for planting (see August for our calculations).

We also move garlic from warm storage to cool storage (more info below)

Potato onions store very well through the winter so long as they are well-cured, dry, well-ventilated, and not packed over 4″ deep. Ideal conditions are a temperature between either 32–41°F (0–5°C) or 50–70°F (10–21°C) with 60-70% humidity.

Special Allium Topic for September: Garlic Storage

Before trimming your garlic, I hope you were sure it was fully cured, and you set aside any non-storing bulbs, such as those with damaged cloves, or any over-mature, springing-open bulbs. It usually works to select your seed-stock bulbs at the same time.

Commercially, garlic is stored in the dark at about 32°F (0°C) and 65% humidity, and depending on the species and variety, it may keep six months or more. I have heard that garlic can be stored for up to nine months at 27°F (-2.7°C), but I have not tried that myself. It does not freeze until 21°F (-6°C). Do not store peeled garlic in oil, as garlic is low in acidity and the botulin toxin could grow.

For storage, garlic (like onions) does best with a humidity of 60%–70%. Refrigerators are usually more humid than ideal.

Garlic will sprout if kept in a temperature range of 40–56°F (4.4–13°C), or if it is allowed to get cold then warm. So long as temperatures remain over 56°F (13°C) you can store garlic almost anywhere. You can use an unheated room in your house, a root cellar, garage, etc. Maintain good air circulation. Most varieties store reasona­bly well in a cool room if hung from the ceiling in mesh bags, or spread on shelves in a layer less than 4″ deep.

In our climate, with a long period in the danger zone temperatures of 40–56°F (4.4–13°C), we keep alliums in the warmer storage range (60-70°F (15.5-21°C) or hotter) in a basement until late September or sometime in October when ambient temperatures in the basement drop close to 56ºF (13°C). We then move our eating garlic from the basement to the walk-in refrigerated cooler at 32–41°F (0–5°C), 95–100%. The low shelves in the cooler near the compressor are damper and do not work well. We use the high and dry shelves.

Juggling space for various crops, moving the garlic out of the basement makes space available for the winter squash harvests in September and October. By this time most of the apples from the walk-in cooler have been eaten, and space is available there. Also there is no longer the problem of ethylene emitted by the apples, which causes garlic to sprout. Ideally ripe fruits and garlic would never be in the same storage space.

Softneck garlics store longest. Silverskins store up to 12 months under the best conditions. Most hardnecks last 4-6 months but Music and Chesnok Red can keep 7 months or more here in central Virginia.

Storage of Seed Garlic

We store our seed garlic on a high shelf in the garden shed, at quite variable ambient temperatures, where it does fine until late October or early November when we plant it. Seed garlic does not require long-term storage conditions! The ideal storage conditions for seed garlic are 50-65°F (10-18°C) and 65-70% relative humidity. Storing in a refrigerator is not a good option for seed garlic, as prolonged cool storage results in “witches-brooming” (strange growth shapes), and early maturity (along with lower yields). Storage above 65°F (18°C) results in delayed sprouting and late maturity.